Wednesday, June 24, 2015

Anchorness: A cultural take on the Anchor persona of Brian Williams

People are talking about Brian Williams again. In case
you hadn't heard, he was the most respected news anchor in America who, until sometime earlier this year. He was forced to leave with tail between legs after he lied about being in a helicopter that went down while investigating a story
in Iraq during the war in 2003. It turns out he was with a group of helicopters
and another heli in the group went down. But over the course of several years,
this story morphed into how his own helicopter was shot from the sky, depicting him
as a heroic journalist who paid a personal price in the war. And the story
caught up with him. He was outed by soldiers no less. Now he's back - this time at MSNBC. But he's still a media image, which is different than a real
person. That's the case I made below, when the scandal first broke.

After hearing and reading many news stories and comments on
Brian Williams, all to some degree with the tone of how he should either a) be given a pass (based on the science of memory) or b) fed to the wolves (lying is
an offense to our shared morality), here is one take I haven’t read. As much as
people would like to believe that we live in the world of Walter Cronkite, we
don’t live in the world of Walter Cronkite anymore. We live in a setting where
the political party who can put the most advantageous frame on some potentially
central reality is considered the one telling the truth. Often, “the truth”
indeed coincides with that frame, other times not so much. Think of it like a
Venn Diagram with the central circle as some event and then more or less
overlapping circles with different versions of the event, some of those circles
representing lies, and others merely different perspectives based on many
factors. Yes, on many grounds — in many areas of our lives, we still believe
there are central truths — whether or not a statement is clearly a fact — the
preeminence of the central circle.

Yet when we
are dealing with the media and politics, the reporting of particular situations is a construction. We might expect that
the truth exists somewhere in that construction, but that may
or may not be the case. When we see a US president, don’t we already know that
there are advisors like David Axelrod or Karl Rove that will advise for or
against real action in the world based on how it will appear to the public?
Representations are often more important than actual realities, but of course are strongest when there is a close fit. And those representations, like the Brian Williams anchor brand, interact
with reality in ways that can be ruinous —for example the presentation of a “good” American politician (male, married, children, dog, God-fearing) is ruined when the
reality of his sexual exchanges with strangers in a truckstop bathroom are
revealed- a reality versus the brand.

Actually, the central reality that I’m proposing is that
Brian Williams is a media brand, so much more than a nameless journalist. The
actual Brian Williams overlaps with the brand Brian Williams but they are
separate things, in the same way the character Stephen Colbert from The Colbert Report on Comedy Central, a parody of Fox News' Bill O'Reilly, was a character qualitatively
different from the real Stephen Colbert. The camps of
those who are, to put it simplistically- on BW’s side, or against him, both
condemn or excuse him based on his actual trustworthiness. Result? a) He is not
trustworthy because he intentionally lied or b) His ability to recall was compromised by
natural function of the human brain. These positions both confuse the anchor brand BW
– a media image- with the living, breathing human BW. The distinction between two brands like Brian Williams and Stephen Colbert (of Comedy Central) is rather flimsy even when the intent is different: the former results from the conscious media presentation of a crafted version of reality while the latter is a construction for satirical effect. Brian Williams the anchor was already going way off brand in recent years with forays into comedic late-night appearances. It was deleterious to insert himself too deeply into the coverage, merging subject and object, and the brand imploded.

The brand BW is now tarnished in whatever way you believe that happened. But he is also a real person — and real people lie, forget, reconstruct events intentionally or otherwise, and remember
things differently, sometimes radically so. The old guard, like Tom Brokaw
or Walter Cronkite, and the new guard of media journalism both have to deal
with upholding the boundaries of trustworthiness and respectability and an
unwavering sense of moral certitude, anchorness if you will.
But they are actually talking about two separate things, a media brand versus a
human being. Of course that brand -the anchor Brian Williams- collides with
reality in the real BW’s pocket.

A previous version of this story was originally posted at Medium: https://medium.com/@MoniqueCentrone